London, UK —
Scrolling through Instagram during the Covid lockdown, Christine Dawood saw something that made her do a double take.
“I just thought, ‘That’s fake,’” she remembers.
She passed her phone to her husband — not out of genuine interest, she says, but in a spirit of astonishment. He was captivated.
“He said, ‘Find out if it’s real,’ and I was like, ‘This is definitely fake.’ But he said, ‘No, find out,’ so I asked our travel agent. And then they came back to us and said, ‘Yeah, it’s possible.’ And I’m like, ‘Really?’”
That fateful day scrolling was a turning point of monumental proportions for Dawood. The Instagram reel that she had assumed was computer-generated was in fact genuine footage of the Titan, a submersible that had been constructed to dive to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking tourists to the wreck of the Titanic.
And her husband, Shahzada, wanted to go.
Everyone knows how the story ends. On June 18, 2023, the Titan imploded off the Titanic’s bow, instantly killing all five on board. Shahzada Dawood was one of them. Their 19-year-old son, Suleman, was at his side.
They died alongside fellow tourist Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a deep-ocean diver who’d been dozens of times to the Titanic, and Stockton Rush, whose company, OceanGate, had built the Titan — and, it would later emerge, knew about its deficiencies according to the US Coast Guard.
Now, after damning reports from the US Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board and its Canadian counterpart about the vessel’s flaws, as well as OceanGate’s “toxic workplace culture” and “intimidation tactics… to evade regulatory scrutiny,” Christine Dawood is ready to talk.
Her book, “Ninety-Six Hours: A Wife and Mother’s Desperate Search for the Lost Titan Sub,” was published in May — the result, she says, of “word-vomiting” her pain onto the page.
In the three years since the tragedy, Dawood has, she says, dealt with post-traumatic health problems, borne witness to the investigations into OceanGate, and suffered an enraging bureaucratic battle to have the remains of her husband and son returned. A life coach with a psychology degree, she is now channeling her grief into helping others, and plans to open a center for psychosomatic illness and trauma next year in the UK.
“I’ve been quiet on purpose, I didn’t want to talk to anybody,” she says. “So why now? I wanted to bring their voices, show the people behind the headlines. They were lovely human beings with their own strengths and weaknesses, their quirks.
“I’m slowly starting a new phase with the healing center, and I will never be able to close that chapter, but I think the book rounds it up, and now I can concentrate on the next thing and leave the public behind.”
Dawood’s understated memoir starts from the day she met Shahzada, when they were both students in her native Germany, and ends after the prayer ceremony the family held for the dead men in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She recounts in excruciating detail the family’s journey on the Polar Prince — the icebreaker that served as mission control for the Titan’s ill-fated final expedition in the North Atlantic — and the 96 hours she spent after the sub was reported missing, hoping for a positive outcome.
She also writes with torturous hindsight about their decision to take the trip. Initially, she was meant to descend to the wreck with Shahzada. She gave her spot to Suleman to gift them a father-son experience to remember.
“I wasn’t instantly excited,” she says about that day she saw the Instagram post, speaking in the family home outside London where she still lives with her daughter.
Dawood suffers from claustrophobia — even long-haul flights are a trial for her. Her husband did too, she says. But Shahzada was thrilled by the idea of visiting the wreck — and was prepared to battle his claustrophobia to do so — so she volunteered to go with him. “Nature exploration was my thing, like going to a forest or on hikes,” she says. “That was out of his comfort zone but he would have come with me. So I would have gone with him.”
Suleman was intrigued, too, but was too young to make the dive when they first saw the ad.
In the wake of the catastrophe, much was made of Suleman’s fascination with the Titanic. The 19-year-old had even made a Lego model of the ship — it still sits in the family’s kitchen today.
But Dawood says that the Titanic was one of countless interests for Suleman sparked by their family travels.
While Harding, the other tourist on the Titan, was a keen adventurer, the Dawoods preferred plusher vacations that taught them something. “We loved a clean toilet and a cushy bed — we were very comfort-oriented,” she says. Shahzada was a history buff, so the family had been to Lebanon to see the ancient Cedars of God forest that the Phoenicians had used to build their ships, becoming the Med’s most famous seafarers. They’d been to England’s Jurassic Coast to hunt for fossils on the beach. They’d seen shipwrecks that had been brought up from the depths in museums. And in 2011, while living in Singapore, they had visited an exhibition about the Titanic, which included objects raised from the wreckage by Nargeolet.
“It was something that interested us, like the cedars, or the Parthenon or the Colosseum, or how the Eiffel Tower was built,” she says.
The exhibition assigned visitors the name of a real-life Titanic passenger on entry, and revealed at the exit whether that person had survived the tragedy. “It was really well done,” she says. “They had original pieces there: clothes, part of the hull. It was fascinating that it was possible to get all these pieces up, because it’s so deep down.”
“In hindsight it looks like that (that Suleman was fascinated) but he also tried to make a painting of Andy Warhol because we went to that exhibition too,” she adds. “He was interested, and he was young. We were like, ‘This is really interesting, and the history and the story is interesting,’ but we weren’t obsessed with it. It was a nice family day. We went for dim sum afterwards.”
The drawn-out pandemic meant that Suleman got the chance to take that interest further. By the time travel was allowed, he was old enough to embark on the Titan. The Dawoods’ original plan had been to try a dive of the Hudson Canyon, also offered by OceanGate. “I think they would have been just as happy going down the Hudson,” she says, adding that her family was more interested in the tech that would allow them to dive so deep, rather than the famous wreck in particular. But, emerging from lockdown, they had the same hankering for a bucket-list trip as everyone else. “We decided, OK, let’s go for the big one straightaway.”
For the past decade, the family had booked vacations through Quintessentially, a high-end concierge service, says Dawood. When she’d sent them the Instagram video of the Titan, they’d replied offering to arrange it. “They didn’t flag anything — they immediately connected me to them,” she says. “They were very excited — they were on the call with me.”
Quintessentially set up an initial call with OceanGate, according to emails seen by CNN. Once the Dawoods paid their deposit, Rush and his wife Wendy, then OceanGate’s communications director, flew over to London to meet them. “I actually saw it as something positive — they’re making an effort, reassuring us,” she says now. Although she dismissed much of Rush’s spiel as “hot air,” she believed the basics. “He was talking about research, which we later found out was complete bullshit,” she says. “He said they are together with NASA, they are doing research with some university, so we thought, OK. None of that was true.” (NASA had consulted with the company over plans for a composite hull, though refused OceanGate permission to use its name in a press release, lest it seem like an endorsement.)
Although she trusted her travel concierge to do due diligence on the safety, Dawood did her own research, too. In her book, she describes searching for statistics about submersible accidents and finding nothing. “And I knew Nargeolet would be with us. Somebody who’s been down there 30 times… they called him ‘Mr Titanic.’ Why would I not trust such a person?”
In 2025, the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) report found that OceanGate had failed to analyze hull anomalies following a 2022 dive. It cited the sub’s “inadequate design, certification, maintenance and inspection process” as the primary contributing factors of the disaster, as well as OceanGate’s “toxic workplace culture” and inadequate regulatory framework and whistleblower procedures. The five deaths were “preventable,” it found.
In her book, Dawood writes about an investigator telling her not to go down the agonizing road of hindsight.
“The head of the investigation said to me, ‘You could not have known,’” she says now. Today, she says, she’d like to see the travel industry more tightly regulated. “If you go to a travel agent, you are placing trust in their expertise,” she says. “That’s their job, right?” She felt that booking through an agent gave more security, she says. Emails reviewed by CNN show Dawood referring to her fear of the planned trip several times when writing to Quintessentially, and the company revisiting the idea of booking the Titanic trip more than once when she had let it go dormant.
Quintessentially said in a statement:
“Oceangate was widely recognised at the time within the global luxury travel sector. However, Quintessentially did not feature or promote this product on any of its platforms, nor was it proactively recommended to its clients and members or the wider market. At no stage was this Oceangate experience ever proactively marketed or suggested to any client or member.” It emphasized that Dawood was the one who initially mooted the idea and said that its involvement was “limited to providing a professional response to the original request.”
A spokesperson added: “Quintessentially is focused on providing the service our clients and members expect of us — whether just to book or otherwise — and we do, of course, alert them to any concerns that arise from our checks.”
Dawood’s book is a forensic account of her experience on board the Polar Prince, starting from her family’s night-time arrival after a delayed flight to a seemingly abandoned shipyard in St. John’s, Newfoundland — ironically, the trip revolved around the couple’s 21st wedding anniversary and her birthday.
Sourced from her journal and from transcripts — she recorded everything after the Titan went missing, she says, in order to report back to relatives on the ground — it’s a slow-burn horror story.
At first they laughed, she says, when they realized the ship for this luxury experience was a bare-bones icebreaker, and they’d be sleeping in bunk beds. They weren’t fazed by the unseasonal roughness of the sea, which flung them around as they headed out into the Atlantic, the Titan bouncing along behind them on a raft towed by the Polar Prince. They coped with the nausea, with their plates sliding across the tables as they tried to eat, with the sense of claustrophobia that came from being in the middle of the sea, without a single identifying point in sight.
There were two dives planned, with four passengers scheduled — “mission specialists,” as they were called, partly to avoid complying with regulations for passenger vessels, OceanGate co-founder told the US Coast Guard investigation, according to the Washington Post. OceanGate decided that Shahzada, Suleman and Hamish Harding would take the first dive. The second would take a passenger who, in the book, she nicknames JB. After his planned dive partner canceled, JB would be the lucky recipient of a private dive. He would soon find out just how lucky he was.
Christine Dawood and her daughter waved Shahzada and Suleman goodbye at 9 a.m. on June 18, 2023, blowing them a kiss as the sub disappeared underwater.
“It was fun,” she says, simply.
On the Polar Prince, she recounts in her book, Suleman had admitted that the adventure was far beyond his comfort zone. When she had suggested he didn’t go, he replied that that discomfort was exactly why he wanted to push himself.
That morning, he put on his favorite red hoodie and boarded the Zodiac boat that took them to where the Titan and its raft bobbed on the waves. From the Polar Prince, Dawood watched Shahzada joking with Hamish — the pair had become friends. “They were waving at me and smiling and just driving away,” she remembers. “I was happy for them.”
Was there any jealousy that she wasn’t going? “Wistfulness,” she says. “I wouldn’t have wanted to have the whole going down and up, but the ‘down there’ would have been nice. I was waiting for them to reach the bottom, then I’d go up to the bridge and live with the experience with them, because we were supposed to get their messages of what they were seeing. Then I would have felt I was seeing it with them.”
Tired and seasick, she was having coffee with JB when a woman, who she won’t identify, came into the mess room and announced casually that they’d lost contact with the sub.
“I didn’t know what to do with that sentence,” she says. “OK, and now what? It didn’t register.”
She went up to the bridge and was reassured that it was “normal.”
It took four full days for the crew to acknowledge that something catastrophic had happened to the sub. In the book, Dawood comes across as the person with the most concerns throughout the wait, while OceanGate operatives reassure her. They might be stuck on the seabed or in the wreckage, they suggest. They could have lost contact and been coming up normally. They scan the sea for signs of the Titan bobbing on the surface, and minimize her concerns about dwindling oxygen supplies. They liaise with the coastguard and the flotilla of ships with ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) and other deep-sea equipment that were coming to help.
In the meantime they feed her, organize movie screenings, poker games and a “jam session.” Not everyone took part — Dawood kept to herself, and she says that a couple of people on board became “hysterical.”
She remained stoical. “I didn’t need to get into crisis as well — I felt, OK, we’ve got this, we have plans on how to get them back up,” she says. “If I’d freaked out that would not help the rescue mission, it would not help the people around me trying to help them, and it would certainly not have helped me.”
Instead, she set herself targets of making it through hour by hour, briefing to briefing, meal to meal. “It’s like when you’re on a walk — OK, I’m going to get to that tree and then I’m going to rest. And then at that tree, you’re like, Oh, I still have some energy, I’m going to go to the next tree.” She tried not to think about the darkness down there at the bottom of the ocean. “It’s a different kind of darkness, right? There’s literally no light. Neither Shahzada or Suleman were very good with darkness.”
At no point did she think that they might already be dead. She was, she says, in denial.
On June 22, the US Coast Guard said it had found wreckage on the oceanbed, 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, which lies at a depth of 13,000 feet. The Titan had suffered a catastrophic implosion; the five men had died before their brains had even had time to register what was happening.
“It’s the best version of the worst thing that can happen,” says Dawood now. Her voice falters as she remembers her worst fear — that they would be brought to safety, but run out of oxygen on the way up. “If they’d suffocated I would not be where I am today,” she says.
What Dawood went through in the aftermath of the tragedy is beyond what many could endure. First there was the media storm — “a juicy story about rich people,” as she calls it. She had to leave the “godforsaken ship,” as she terms the Polar Prince, disguised from the cameras. With her in-laws, she arranged for prayers to be said for Shahzada and Suleman, both Muslims, in St John’s — Islam normally requires a swift burial, though if there’s no body, special prayers can release the souls.
She was criticized by some for not seeming emotional enough in the one interview she gave in a bid to curtail media attention. And then she had to come home. “There were no bodies to bring back, all we had was their bags. I put them in Suleman’s room and didn’t look at them for months,” she says.
Repatriating their remains — two small boxes of “slush” — became a bureaucratic nightmare. The men had died in international waters, the Polar Prince was Canadian, and the rescue had been US-led. Their remains had been brought to a Canadian port, but the Dawoods lived in the UK. Legally they should have been cremated, but cremation isn’t allowed in Islam. Even with a lawyer, it took nine months.
“They had to make sure the DNA was properly separated so that we didn’t get parts from somebody else,” she says. “And then at some point I finally got the message. The flight number. They’re on their way.”
The mental trauma caused physical symptoms. She says she developed vertigo, blurred vision, and couldn’t walk in a straight line. She planned to go to the US for the public hearings held by the US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation in September 2024, but was too unwell to leave the house. Her family doctor, she says, “saved my life many times over.”
Eventually, she contacted a private clinic specializing in psychosomatic medicine in Germany. “I guess there is a benefit if things are very public — I wrote that my husband and son died in that accident around midnight, and they called me at 8 a.m. and said, ‘We have a place for you,’” she says, smiling. “And then I just went.”
The two months she spent there broke the cycle. Without it, she says, “I might be on a psychiatric ward now.” Her experience is the motivation for her next chapter: launching a similar center in the UK. Due to open by the start of 2028, it will be the country’s first.
Three years on, that center is becoming Dawood’s next chapter. “Sometimes I wake up now and that’s the first thought in my mind, not the grief,” she says. “It was quite a profound realization — I can think about something else. I want to help people. I don’t think grief should be experienced alone.”
Nargeolet’s family have sued OceanGate, and Dawood says she’s been asked to join lawsuits, but doesn’t want to out of self-preservation. “I don’t want to be consumed by anger,” she says. “I want to be able to look at their pictures and smile.” It’s notable that while she can discuss the details of her relatives’ deaths, she doesn’t mention Stockton Rush by name. She has never heard from OceanGate, she says, not even formal condolences.
In the meantime, she takes solace in nature — walking in the Surrey Hills south of London, through a forest of 1,000-year-old yew trees nearby, and feeling connected to Shahzada and Suleman when she’s by the sea. Sometimes she still expects them to walk through the door, she says; if she sees a young man in a red hoodie, she startles, thinking it’s Suleman. Chatting in her home, she occasionally slips into the present tense when talking about them.
But through her grief, Dawood is trying to live. She has been on vacation — even to visit friends in Canada. Flying over the North Atlantic was, she says, “very, very uncomfortable.”
Writing the book brought out Titanic fans, who came to the signings. Why does she think so many people are intrigued by the story?
“Well, it’s a tragedy, isn’t it?” she shrugs. “I think humans are always fascinated by tragedy.
“Loss of life in a non-natural way is always a fascination, isn’t it? We’re just programmed to prefer the most gory kinds of stories.”
